How to contribute to iOS Journaling Suggestions?

Question

Apple's new Journal app was introduced with the iOS 17.2 beta.

In the release notes, the following is mentioned:

If your app donates activities or interactions to SiriKit or CallKit or if someone authorizes your app to save data to HealthKit, some data might show up as part of Journaling Suggestions.

Is there any documentation on how this works exactly? What kind of activities can be featured in Journal? How does the system decide what to feature?

For instance, if I have an app that allows the user to create art images, can I somehow make those images appear in the Journaling Suggestions?

Answer 1

From what I understand from the Journaling Suggestions framework (and other devs on the internet), there is no way to feed suggestions into the Journal app. It’s meant to get suggestions out of the Journal app and feed them into your app.

From the Journaling Suggestions Framework:

If your app facilitates personal writing, display the picker to provide people with ideas for their creative content. When someone chooses a suggestion from the picker, the system makes high-level details about the event available to your app. For example, a journaling app uses the details to display the beginning of a new journal entry about the selected suggestion.

Regarding the SiriKit, CallKit and HealthKit suggestions, my guess would be the following:
The suggestion types include things like workouts, contacts, locations, and so on. I think, with the comment in the release notes Apple meant that, if these things get contributed to the mentioned frameworks they may also appear in the JournalingSuggestionsPicker inside your app. Simply because those things may get picked up by the Journal app and then also appear in the suggestions list.

Again, this is just my guess. I’m not fully into this framework, just wondered myself. ✌️